You still don't get it

by Albert Haim

No one is asking you to read books in order to mold your likings or dislikings of jazz recordings. You write,

"Why should I take on other peoples' viewpoints and possible personal bias. I am grown up enough and intelligent enough to form my own opinions, by listening to the music and coming to my own conclusions."

"... my advice to Enrico is that he listens to the records and forms his own opinions, without evaluating or judging them from what he has read. "

No one is asking you to take on other people's viewpoints, and I am sure that Enrico listens to records and has his own opinions.

That is not the point at all. The whole discussion in this thread has to do with the early history of jazz. You can listen to every single recording of Fats Waller and you will not learn much about the early history of jazz. To learn about the chronological facts (not opinions) about the early history of jazz, it is important to read accounts by contemporary witnesses and books written by jazz historians. An objective witness and a competent historian will try to provide unbiased accounts. Of course, there are lots of subjective (used here as the opposite of objective) witnesses, there are critics and historians with agendas, and they distort the history by presenting biased accounts. Here is where the reader can use his intelligence to extract the objective facts from attempts to distort history to fit agendas. That it why it is important not to close one's mind, not to ignore the writings that throw light and (one hopes) provide demonstrable facts about the early history of jazz.

When it comes to the question of communism and jazz, again you don't get it. No one is saying that a communist cannot enjoy jazz. The point is that political beliefs (right or left) on the part of some individuals have the nasty consequence that these individuals fail to see historic reality as it is, they look at history though a flawed prism that seriously distorts reality.